On the Bus

Can John McCain reinvent Republicanism?

McCain has, in effect, stumbled to the head of a party brimming with ferment.Credit RICHARD THOMPSON

John McCain’s campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, has had many incarnations. In 2000, when McCain competed against George W. Bush for the Republican Presidential nomination, the bus was a stage for his around-the-clock monologues with the press corps. For the 2008 campaign, the Straight Talk (as the McCain staff calls it) began as a state-of-the-art behemoth, as big as a tractor-trailer. Then, as McCain’s fortunes fell—the campaign essentially went bankrupt over the summer—the sleek Straight Talk, which reportedly cost nine thousand dollars a day, was replaced by something that looked more like an actual bus. It is sixteen years old, not exactly shabby but definitely worn. It is usually trailed by a coach carrying McCain’s travelling press, and, during most legs of the campaign trips, individual reporters are summoned to join the candidate on the Straight Talk. On a recent Sunday morning, two days before the January 29th Florida primary, the bus started up outside a television studio in Tampa, where McCain had just recorded his fifty-second appearance on “Meet the Press.”

In the front of the bus are eight captain’s chairs, where McCain’s senior advisers and an assortment of family members sit. These include McCain’s wife, Cindy; one of his senior strategists, Charlie Black, a quiet North Carolinian who heads one of Washington’s biggest lobbying firms; Mark Salter, McCain’s writing collaborator and longtime Senate chief of staff. Absent that Sunday morning were the Blogettes—McCain’s daughter Meghan and two of her friends, who together write a lively online chronicle of their adventures on the campaign trail.

Past the captain’s chairs, the center passageway narrows. On one side is a bathroom and on the other a galley stocked with Dunkin’ Donuts and Coke, the staples of the McCain diet. McCain sits in the rear of the bus, at the center of a horseshoe-shaped gray leather couch—what is called the “circle lounge.” In one corner, a television is tuned to MSNBC—never Fox News. As many as ten reporters squeeze around the horseshoe, until they are wedged thigh to thigh on either side of the Senator.

McCain, who is seventy-one, looks both older and more vigorous than he does on television, which tends to conceal the scars from a skin cancer. In person, he is all energy and motion. At one moment, bursting into laughter, he exuberantly explains why, after “a short period of waterboarding to find out what they did in their absence,” he would take back some of the staffers who fled his campaign at its low point. At another, he cracks up over one of his own familiar jokes. That morning, he was talking on his cell phone to Governor Jon Huntsman, Jr., of Utah, who made a surprise endorsement of McCain back in 2006, passing over former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, a fellow-Mormon. Huntsman has a warm relationship with McCain and has been mentioned as a possible running mate. Somewhat improbably, he was stumping for the Senator in Miami. “Thank you, my friend,” McCain bellowed. “I just had my interrogation on Russert”—Tim Russert, the moderator of “Meet the Press.” “It’s a good thing I had all that preparation in North Vietnam!”

In fact, the candidate was eager to talk about his television interview. He reached into a breast pocket, pulled out an index card, and, referring to Russert, said, “You know how he always gives quotes? I had to give the Romney quote to him.” He held the card tightly with two hands and read, “ ‘No question we’ll have to have a series of timetables and milestones. But those shouldn’t be for public pronouncement. You don’t want the enemy to understand how long they have to wait in the weeds till you’re going to be gone.’ ” The quotation, referring to a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, is from an interview that Romney gave last April to ABC’s “Good Morning America,” and, in the days leading up to the Florida vote, McCain read it to anyone who would listen. He treated it as the Aha! moment of the campaign. As Democrats were calling for what McCain referred to as “surrender,” Mitt Romney legitimatized their argument by uttering the word “timetables.” McCain said, “There’s no other way you can interpret that, except that he was saying ‘timetables.’ That’s all there is to it.”

There was more to it. Romney was not proposing a specific date for withdrawal. He was suggesting that President Bush privately discuss timetables of some sort with the Iraqi government, though it was unclear exactly what he meant. McCain thought that he was on the verge of winning the Republican nomination because, while his Republican opponents hedged their bets, he had risked everything to support increasing the number of troops in Iraq—the “surge”—when the idea was at its most unpopular. The attack on Romney was unfair, even false, in its particulars, but McCain believed that Romney had shown the least backbone of all the candidates.

Somebody said to McCain that Romney had said he should apologize for twisting the intent of the words, and McCain became indignant: “He ought to apologize to the men and women who are serving, because they deserve steady and steadfast leadership, particularly when times are tough. And his statement obviously was looking for the blinking exit sign.” He continued, “I remind you again, it’s just a fact, that at that point, in April, 2007, it was at the worst point. Harry Reid”—the Senate Majority Leader—“is giving speeches on the floor of the Senate saying the war is lost. He didn’t say, ‘The surge isn’t going to work,’ he didn’t say, ‘We are going to fail.’ He said it was lost. All the Democrats were outdoing each other: ‘I’ll get them out in six months,’ ‘No, I’ll get them out in three months,’ ‘No, I’ll get them out tomorrow,’ ‘I’ll get ’em out. We’re losing.’ ”

McCain showed a flash of anger. “And those same people were saying McCain’s political ambitions are at an end. The fact is you also know that John Edwards was calling it ‘the McCain strategy’ and ‘the McCain surge,’ and not because he was trying to flatter me. That was a genuine seminal time as to whether we were going to go forward with the additional troops, which was, I admit, highly unpopular—highly unpopular.” McCain picked up his index card. “Quote: ‘You don’t want the enemy to understand how long they have to wait in the weeds until you’re going to be gone.’ That’s not helpful! That’s not helpful!” He tapped the index card on the table as he pronounced each syllable. Another reporter gently tried to point out that Romney didn’t support withdrawing the troops. McCain wouldn’t yield: “If he didn’t think that they were going to be gone, then he wouldn’t have said that. It’s just a statement of fact.”

This episode, the final important volley of the Republican primaries, nicely captured two sides of McCain. There is the principled McCain, who, more than any other candidate running for President this year, has a record of sticking to a position even when it puts his political future at risk. In this campaign, his positions on the surge and on immigration (he supported a guest-worker program and a path to citizenship for illegals) almost sank him. But there is also the political McCain, who knows that a reputation for standing on principle is a valuable commodity, though only if it’s well advertised. If it takes flogging a dodgy quote to emphasize a larger truth about your own character, then so be it.

It is bracing to drop in on the McCain campaign after covering the overly managed productions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The Democratic candidates rarely speak to the travelling press. McCain not only packs his bus with reporters (whom he often greets with an affectionate “Hello, jerks!”) but talks until the room is filled with the awkward silence of journalists with no more questions. The Obama campaign, like the Bush White House, prides itself on message discipline and tracks down leakers with a frightening intensity. McCain and his aides openly discuss strategy, whether it’s Brooke Buchanan, McCain’s travelling press secretary, prepping him for a press conference (“ABC might ask about that”) or McCain discussing his targeting strategy for Tampa (“I thought we did a robo-call to tell people about Schwarzkopf”—referring to the endorsement by General Norman Schwarzkopf).

The intimacy of the bus means that McCain’s family life is an open book. (Cindy is dismayed that their son Jack recently split up with his girlfriend; John has turned his daughter Meghan’s status as an unemployed art-history grad into a punch line.) The chumminess with the press usually spills into the evenings, and McCain’s senior advisers dine almost nightly with the people covering the candidate.

McCain’s open-access policy is partly strategic. After all, he is able to hammer talking points like any politician. (It’s not just his jokes that he repeats.) But, by engaging reporters in long, even substantive conversations, he also disarms them. The incentive to ask “gotcha” questions that feed the latest news cycle is greatly reduced, and the hours of exposure to McCain breed a relationship that inclines journalists to be more careful about describing the context of his statements. Mark Salter believes that McCain’s back-of-the-bus rambles rarely produce gaffes. “Ten per cent of the time, something like that is going to happen,” he said. “But ninety per cent of the time it works out fine. If you just make your case, and reporters are familiar with you and know how you talk and know what you mean when you’re bouncing around on a bus and you truncate your sentences or something, then they know what you’re driving at, and you’re going to be fine.”

All this access isn’t just a calculated risk; McCain has a near-clinical need to be around people. And his extended soliloquies are also a way for him to mock his reputation, well deserved, according to accounts of some of his Senate colleagues over the years, for having an explosive temper. “I do enjoy the company of some people that I’ve gotten to know who are professional journalists,” he says. “They’ll write things or report things that I don’t want to see, and I get mad as hell about it and enraged and lose my temper and want to punch them out. But the fact is, I think you can enjoy life.”

In the months before Super Tuesday, on February 5th, the essential elements of the McCain campaign were the Straight Talk and the town-hall meeting. In these forums, he won two crucial constituencies—the press and the voters. He succeeded not because of his ideology but, to some extent, in spite of it. He won over reporters because they took pleasure in his company as well as in his rebellious persona, and he won over a plurality of primary and caucus voters because the conservative majority in most key states was divided between two of his opponents, Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, and Mitt Romney. “McCain is a minority nominee who was fortunate to have the conservative vote consistently split,” Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, told me. “And he probably would have lost the nomination had there been a conservative able to unify the conservative movement.”

McCain was lucky in other ways, too. A series of unlikely events, beyond his control, had to unfold in order for him to win. “He did it by drawing an inside straight,” Mark McKinnon, McCain’s media adviser, told me two days after Super Tuesday. “A hundred things had to happen, most of them improbable, and ninety-nine have so far. The key things had to be the success of the surge, reduction of the heat on immigration, somebody having to take out Romney in Iowa”—the January 3rd Iowa caucus, which Huckabee won. “Rudy”—Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor—“had to pull out of New Hampshire. If Rudy hadn’t pulled out of New Hampshire, Romney would have won, because we would have split the votes with Giuliani.” And it didn’t hurt that Huckabee, McCain’s principal adversary in the January 20th South Carolina primary, made a tactical mistake on the eve of the vote. “Huckabee should have stayed in South Carolina, instead of going to Michigan and spending two, three days and a million bucks,” McKinnon said.

McCain has, in effect, stumbled to the head of his party. As he was reminded when conservative talk-radio hosts led a last-minute insurrection against his candidacy in the run-up to Super Tuesday, it is a party brimming with ideological ferment. Conservative journals are full of debates about the meaning of McCainism, and publishing houses are releasing tracts by conservatives trying to point the Party in a new direction. Two voices from the nineties and two from the Bush era offer a glimpse of the landscape that McCain faces as he tries to put the Party back together.

Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist were architects of the conservative ascendancy in the Clinton years, but the two men now offer visions for the future that are at odds. Gingrich’s prescription is most notable for what he explicitly rejects. The leader of the Republican takeover of the House in 1994, Gingrich now argues that the era of running against the government has ended. “The Republican Party cannot win over time as the permanently angry anti-government party because neither appeals to most voters,” he writes in his recent book, “Real Change.” Rather, he argues, Republicans must learn to be competent managers of the bureaucracy and “pro-good government.” Furthermore, he advises them to reject the Party’s guiding strategy of the past eight years: making increasingly urgent appeals to its most conservative supporters for maximum turnout. In what sounds like the advice that New Democrats gave liberals in the nineteen-eighties, Gingrich points out that “Republicans allow their campaigns to be dominated more and more by pandering to small, specific segments of the activist wing of the party”—a trend that he believes has contributed to the drop in Republican numbers on the two coasts. Gingrich’s advice amounts to a sharp rebuke of the dominant political and governing philosophy of the Bush years—in particular, the strategies formulated and advocated by Bush’s former political adviser Karl Rove—and he suggests that if McCain attempts a dramatic refashioning of his party he may find support in surprising places.

Norquist, a longtime conservative organizer, has a different view. In a forthcoming book, “Leave Us Alone,” he describes the Republican Party as little more than a collection of interest groups—such as anti-tax activists, gun-rights advocates, and homeschoolers—that, if they are carefully tended, will grow into a “supermajority.” The merits of his argument aside, Norquist’s description of the conservative coalition is notable for what it leaves out—voters whose overriding concern is national security. That exclusion seems to be a trend on the small-government right. Not long ago, I spoke with Mallory Factor, a Republican fund-raiser and the co-organizer of a monthly meeting for conservative thinkers and activists in New York. When I mentioned that McCain’s aides plan to use the Iraq war to unite the right, he said, “That’s not the glue that keeps conservatives together. There is an enormous amount of frustration over the war on a number of grounds, from the cost, to the way the war has been fought, to what the outcome is. One of the things that I’ve talked about in our group is that we’re using the finest military in the world as an N.G.O. I mean, we’re talking about nation-building, not fighting a war. Is that the proper use of our military?”

Factor has reason to be concerned. In a recent Foreign Affairs article, McCain called for the kind of costly nation-building capacity that makes libertarians shudder, arguing that the United States should “energize and expand our postconflict reconstruction capabilities” and create a “deployable police force” that would prop up collapsing states. Echoing Norquist’s book, Factor insisted that the war in Iraq is not a unifying issue for the right. He told me, “The bottom line is that to the base of the Party the war isn’t Communism—to the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan, Communism was a rallying point. This is not like that.”

David Frum and Michael Gerson are former Bush-era colleagues who, like Gingrich and Norquist, now see the world very differently. Both were White House speechwriters—best known as two of the three authors who claim to have given birth to the phrase “axis of evil.” Last fall, Gerson, now a Washington Post columnist, published a book called “Heroic Conservatism,” which reads like a defense of a Bush legacy that Gerson wanted to create while he worked in the White House but which bears no resemblance to Bush’s actual Presidency.

Gerson’s book, though, is a reminder that Bush’s original campaign slogan, “compassionate conservatism,” was meant to signal a rejection of the anti-government conservatism of the nineteen-nineties. One of Gerson’s early speeches for Bush attacked any governing philosophy with “no higher goal, no nobler purpose than ‘leave us alone’ ”—a Norquist battle cry even then. As a Presidential candidate in 1999, Bush criticized House Republicans for balancing the budget “on the backs of the poor,” and Gerson slipped into one of Bush’s speeches a veiled shot at Robert Bork, the Supreme Court nominee rejected by the Reagan-era Senate. (“Too often, on social issues, my party has painted an image of America slouching towards Gomorrah,” Bush said. Bork, whose 1996 book “Slouching Towards Gomorrah” was a sour indictment of an America in decline, responded, “Mr. Bush evidently thinks conservatives are another species altogether.”) But, once in the White House, Gerson proved far more influential in injecting compassionate conservatism into Bush’s speeches than into his policies. These days, Gerson is trying to resurrect the case for the role of government in addressing problems of poverty, disease, and education.

Frum, in his new book, “Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again,” warns conservatives about social trends that may overwhelm the Republican Party. He notes that Republicans have lost a generation of young voters during the Bush years. “The people who turned twenty between 1985 and 1990 were eight points more Republican than Democratic,” he told me. “People who turned twenty between 1970 and 1975 were eight points more Democratic than Republican. People who turned twenty between 2000 and 2005 are twelve points more Democratic.” He sees a country moving slightly to the left as Republicans are “left stranded on the right.” He told me, “If what you are is a pragmatic, business-oriented, moderate-minded person who wants things to work in a fairly competent and ethical way, and you’re under thirty—the kind of person who would have been an Eisenhower Republican and a Republican in the Nixon years and in the George H. W. Bush years—you are a Democrat today.” Frum added, “As the country becomes more single, more childless, more secular, more non-white, more immigrant, it becomes more Democratic. And all of those groups are growing.” Frum has ideas on how conservatives can reverse this trend, but his most radical thought is that, given the realities of the federal budget and the public’s unwillingness to curb entitlement spending, Republicans need to rethink their approach to tax cuts. He proposes making a deal with Democrats in which some of the Bush tax cuts become permanent in exchange for a carbon tax to deal with the global-warming crisis.

McCain has modified his rhetoric on immigration and made peace with Jerry Falwell, whom he described in 2000 as an agent of “intolerance.” But his promise to make permanent the Bush tax cuts, which he twice voted against—once calling them an affront to his “conscience”—is probably his most brazen pandering. “There is this terrible gravitational pull when candidates need to reconnect with the Party base,” Frum said. “When you have a Giuliani or a McCain who has been innovative and moved to issues where there’s a lot of potential appeal, the issue where they keep on being yanked back—the test of orthodoxy—is on the tax issue. That’s the thing that the Party demands from its leader. And it’s just lethal.”

McCain’s tax-cutting pledge points to a dilemma of his campaign. Having become the presumptive nominee on the strength of support from moderates and independents, he is being forced to start the general election by trying to attract conservatives. McCain regularly boasts that he was a “foot soldier in the Reagan revolution”; on the night of February 12th, after his victories in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, he used some of the most generic Republican language of the campaign, ticking off a string of small-government platitudes. (“We don’t believe that government has all the answers,” “We don’t believe in growing the size of government,” and so on.) Oddly, McCain is attempting to portray himself as a doctrinaire conservative just when the intellectual class of the movement seems eager for something new.

Gingrich, Gerson, and Frum all reject the anti-government ethos that has come to define conservatism. Gingrich calls for managerial competence in government. Gerson asks for expanded programs to fight poverty at home and to combat AIDS abroad. Frum recommends making peace with the realities of the welfare state. Other conservatives have attacked these views, and perhaps the Frums and Gingriches are simply out of touch with the grass roots of their party. However, these disputes also suggest that McCain, if he can tame his right-wing critics—and Mitt Romney’s endorsement last week will only help—may have a rare opportunity to reinvent what it means to be a Republican.

Conversations on the Straight Talk are not always about McCain’s views on Iraq or tax reform or, really, substantive issues of any kind. Rather, the scene consists of long stretches of banter punctuated by short, intense discussions of politics and policy. A rotating cast of characters—the loyalists who have stuck with him, some without pay—provide comic relief and distraction when McCain becomes bored or wants to change the subject. Steve Schmidt, one of the campaign’s chief strategists, is usually perched on a ledge in a corner of the lounge. He is thirty-seven, has a shaved head, and often wears a Bluetooth earpiece, which gives him a menacing and futuristic look. Schmidt worked for the unflinchingly conservative Dick Cheney in 2005, and for California’s pragmatic, moderate governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in 2006. On the bus, his role is to play a sort of Ed McMahon to McCain’s Johnny Carson. McCain refers to him as Sergeant Schmidt and usually greets him in a gravelly voice through a clenched jaw—“Fall in!”—that mimics a hard-nosed military commander. One of McCain’s running gags is that Schmidt was temporarily demoted to corporal after McCain lost the Michigan primary to Mitt Romney, on January 15th, and, because Schmidt has been working without a salary, McCain makes the obvious joke: “You get what you pay for.” McCain’s entire conversational style is built on anecdotes, and he often turns to Schmidt to dispense wisdom when the conversation moves into the political tall grass. “Maybe we can get a word of analysis from Sergeant Schmidt?” McCain will say after a question about exit polls or Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy. Schmidt replies with some banal talking points or an extended soliloquy, depending on his interest in the question. Once, in Florida, McCain asked if the enthusiasm of the final rally of the day, in Lady Lake, was a sign of the campaign’s momentum. Schmidt looked up from his BlackBerry and nodded: “It is.”

At other times, Schmidt comes alive as a sort of political Rain Man. During one back-of-the-bus conversation, he explained that in 2004, when he was working for Bush’s reëlection, “we targeted voters not where they lived but how they lived their lives, in the same way that credit-card companies do.” He went on, “And so we know, for instance, that among independent voters there are life styles and behaviors that identify them as Republicans or Democrats. For example, the GMC Yukon is a Republican vehicle, and Volvos and Subarus are the most Democratic vehicles. Republicans have Fiji water preferences, versus Democrats, who have Evian water preferences. You have a huge grouping of consumer data, so you can micro-target messages to common groups, finding pleasure points and anger points on issues.”

South Carolina’s senior senator, Lindsey Graham, plays a similar role in the McCain campaign, though he is treated more like Sideshow Bob, from “The Simpsons.” “We went into South Carolina with a millstone around my neck called Lindsey Graham,” McCain told reporters one day, reminiscing about that primary. (Graham, like McCain, has championed immigration reform—“Lindsey Graham-nesty,” Rush Limbaugh calls him—and opposed some of the Bush Administration’s terrorist-detention policies.) McCain is superstitious. He carries a penny that the publisher of the New Hampshire Union Leader gave him for good luck. Graham served a similar purpose—as a lucky charm. The night of McCain’s Florida victory, Graham, sipping a Baileys on ice, noted that McCain’s superstitiousness was forcing him to remain on the campaign trail. “I have to get home,” he complained, half joking that McCain was keeping him hostage.

McCain can be combative and irritable in his town-hall meetings. At one Florida event, when a woman revealed that she was a lawyer, McCain interrupted to tell one of his favorite, not entirely fresh jokes: “What’s the difference between a catfish and a lawyer?” Answer: “One is a scum-sucking bottom dweller, and the other is a fish!” McCain smiled, seeming pleased with himself. At the same event, two women held anti-McCain placards. One said, “Senator McCain, tell Florida why you don’t support us!!” The other asked, “Senator McCain, why do you hate Florida?” The signs were apparently references to McCain’s opposition to a national catastrophe fund that would help reduce the cost of insurance in hurricane-prone areas. During a rambling question about hospitals, a voter mentioned that even evangelicals and atheists could agree. McCain responded, “What about the Trotskyites? There’s a couple of them over there. They have signs.”

One day on the Straight Talk, McCain discussed what he was reading. It is safe to say that Gingrich, Norquist, Gerson, and Frum were not on his nightstand; McCain is almost always looking at military histories or political biographies. In the 2000 campaign, he seemed to be reading a lot about Theodore Roosevelt, and he frequently worked T.R. anecdotes into his conversations. These days, he often cites William Manchester, a former marine and a Second World War veteran, who has written biographies of Winston Churchill and General Douglas MacArthur. When a reporter asked McCain what would happen if he lost the Florida primary, he went off on a Manchester tangent. “The first thing is that Schmidt would be court-martialled,” he said. “And although we abandoned flogging as a tradition in the British Navy we would reinstate flogging, and he would be tied to the yardarm and flogged.” Schmidt did not look up from his BlackBerry. McCain continued, “Did you ever hear the story about Winston Churchill when he became the first Lord of the Admiralty and did away with all the old British naval regulations which had been in effect since Lord Nelson, including flogging, which was still in the naval regulations of the British Royal Navy? He was at a reception—like all Churchill stories, this may or may not be true—and a retired British admiral came up to him and said, ‘Sir Winston, you have destroyed British naval traditions.’ And Churchill said, ‘Sir, the British Royal Navy only has three traditions: rum, sodomy, and the lash.’ I think it’s in Manchester’s book, ‘The Last Lion.’ ”

Recently, McCain said, he had read “The Coldest Winter,” David Halberstam’s account of the Korean War and its era. “I strongly recommend it,” he told the reporters. “It’s beautifully done. It’s not just about the war, but it’s a very good description, whether you agree with it or not, of the political climate at that time—the split in the Republican Party between the Taft wing”—Senator Robert Taft, of Ohio—“and the Eisenhower wing, and Harry Truman’s incredible relationship with MacArthur.” He added, “At least half the book is about the political situation in the United States during that period—the isolationism, who lost China, the whole political dynamic. That’s what I think makes it well worth reading.”

It was a telling reference and points to McCain’s transformation between 2000 and 2008—from a Teddy Roosevelt Republican to an Eisenhower Republican. In 2000, McCain railed against corporate power and the influence of lobbyists and money in politics. Today, the only mention of corporations in his stump speech is a demand that the corporate-tax rate be lowered. After 2000, McCain seemed briefly to be considering leaving the Republican Party, just as Roosevelt had. But, once terrorism and the war in Iraq became the preëminent issues, he decided instead to take over the Party, just as Eisenhower and the Republican moderates did when, in 1952, they vanquished the Old Guard isolationists who supported Taft. Instead of battling the corporate wing of his party, McCain has decided that it’s the isolationists—a group that he defines broadly, and which includes the left and the right—who are the real threat.

One afternoon, McCain talked about his surprise at the resurrection of this element in his party, which has been particularly visible in the candidacy of the libertarian Texas congressman Ron Paul. “We had a debate in Iowa. I mean, it was, like, last summer, one of the first debates we had. It was raining, and I’m standing there in the afternoon, it was a couple of hours before the debate,” McCain said. “And I happen to look out the window. Here’s a group of fifty people in the rain, shouting ‘Ron Paul! Ron Paul!’ ” McCain banged on the table with both fists and chanted as he imitated the Paul enthusiasts. “I thought, Holy shit, what’s going on here? I mean, go to one of these debates. Drive up. Whose signs do you see? I’m very grateful—they’ve been very polite. I recognize them and say thanks for being here. They haven’t disrupted the events. But he has tapped a vein. And it’s a combination of isolationism, the old part of our party, and the conspiracy. You know”—McCain lowered his head and spoke in a mock-confiding voice—“ ‘We have made an important discovery: the headquarters for the organization that’s going to merge three countries into one—Canada, Mexico, and the U.S.—is in Kansas City!’ ”

McCain is careful not to mock the broader libertarian right, which makes up a far larger share of his party than Paul’s followers do. Nonetheless, his victory is a repudiation of small-government conservatism, a development not seen in the years of Barry Goldwater, Reagan, and the two Bushes. “For the first time since Eisenhower,” Newt Gingrich told me, “you have someone who has clearly not accommodated the conservative wing winning the nomination. That is a remarkable achievement.”

“Hey, Brooke!” McCain yelled into the galley, as we made our way from St. Petersburg to Tampa. “Have we got any coffee?” Although Brooke Buchanan is technically the travelling press secretary, in a campaign that has been forced to do more with less, she also serves as his “body woman,” taking care of everything from spraying down stray strands of hair before he faces the cameras to making sure that he’s well caffeinated. As McCain bantered with reporters, his paragraphs were often interrupted mid-thought with a loud request for Buchanan, usually concerning the temperature. “It’s a little warm, Brooke!” he shouted during one trip. It was still too hot a while later, when McCain went on to discuss Hillary Clinton’s progress in the Democratic race: “A lot of people, after Iowa, said she’s not going to win New Hampshire, and she was able to really out-campaign Senator Obama, I think, is my observation. It’s still hot in here, Brooke, and you’re fired! Don’t get on the bus at the next stop! Remember when Senator Dole left his staff on the tarmac in Iowa or wherever it was?”

The surest sign of affection from McCain is this kind of steady, sarcastic abuse, and Buchanan is clearly well liked. “She’s probably still trying to repair her cell phone, which she dropped because she’s shaky from last night’s consumption,” McCain chided her. “You know, she’s been out to Betty Ford’s place twice, and we’re just sort of hoping for the best. One day at a time. We had a little slip last night.”

This crack set eyes rolling among the assembled reporters. McCain has been doing a version of the Straight Talk show for so long that the veterans know all the lines. “I haven’t heard that Betty Ford thing in a while,” Jill Zuckman, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, said. McCain laughed mischievously, like someone who knows he has just been figured out. “Nothing is new! Nothing is new! Nothing is new!” he said, throwing his hands up. “One thing we know on this bus is nothing is new.”

Later in the day, on the way to Orlando, a new reporter entered the circle lounge and wedged herself into the horseshoe next to McCain.

“And you are?” McCain asked.

“Katie Connolly, with Newsweek.”

“Newsweek? Are you on a work release or drug rehab?”

“Both, actually.”

“Well, we hope you get better.” After shouting at Brooke for some coffee—“in contravention to every one of my instructions and orders, we’ll let you back in on a provisional basis”—McCain then earnestly thanked the reporters for joining him. “The nice thing about this campaign is when you’re with your friends,” he said. “That makes it so much better and so much more enjoyable.”

“It’s nice that you say that about me, seeing as we only just met,” Connolly said.

“Ha! I see we’ve got another smart-ass on the bus.”

“I heard that was a condition of entry.”

“That is a condition of entry—sarcasm, lack of sincerity,” McCain assented. Schmidt chimed in from his spot in the corner: “And willingness to laugh at the same jokes.”

Many conservatives are anguished about the prospect of a McCain Presidency. Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator from Pennsylvania, has summarized the right’s case against McCain. “He has opposed pro-growth tax cuts and supported limits on political speech,” Santorum wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer last week. “He has pushed amnesty when it came to illegal immigration and half-measures when it came to interrogating terrorists. He wants to close Guantánamo and allow the reimportation of prescription drugs into the United States. Not only does he part company with conservatives on these and other issues—climate change, drilling for oil in the Alaskan hinterland, federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research, international criminal courts, gun-show background checks—he invariably adopts the rhetoric of the left and stridently leads the opposition.” Working with a Democratic Congress, a President McCain could well pass half the agenda that Republicans have been fighting against for the past decade.

McCain has also surrounded himself with the sort of Republicans who make conservatives nervous. In the weeks before Super Tuesday, a Who’s Who of moderate—or at least maverick—Republicans joined McCain on his bus. In Florida, McCain was aligned with Governor Charlie Crist, who won the primary in 2006 as a moderate opposed by a right-wing opponent. Crist made his name in state politics by championing civil rights, opposing federal meddling in the Terri Schiavo case, and, as governor, making the environment a signature issue. In Florida political circles, Crist’s endorsement of McCain was also seen as snubbing the conservative political machine of Jeb Bush, which was behind Romney. On the eve of Crist’s election, in 2006, George W. Bush went to Florida to campaign, but Crist conspicuously found himself in another part of the state.

The day after Crist’s endorsement of McCain, the Straight Talk picked up two senators—Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut Independent, and Mel Martinez, a Florida Republican. Aside from the war and national-security issues, Lieberman, who is also a close friend of McCain’s, still votes with the Democrats on most questions. Martinez’s recent political views (like McCain’s) have been shaped by his battles with the right. He was nominated by President Bush to be General Chairman of the Republican National Committee, which set off a fierce internal battle over Martinez’s views on immigration. The Republican Party of Texas even passed a resolution rejecting the Martinez nomination. Last year, the Senator abruptly resigned from the post, with little explanation; a few months later, he endorsed McCain. During the bus ride, there wasn’t much policy discussion among the three senators. “The best chick flick of the season is ‘Atonement,’ ” Martinez observed, during one typical conversation. “Keira Knightley. She’s not hard to look at for a while!” But when he got to discussing the abuse of earmarks—one of McCain’s defining issues—Martinez defended the federal government’s role, as opposed to the prerogatives of individual members of Congress, in deciding how money should be spent. “Some would say if I didn’t earmark it then the bureaucrat would get to decide where the money went,” he said. “Well, I’m sorry, but it isn’t a bureaucrat but an authorized program that otherwise gets the funding.”

When the McCain entourage arrived in California after the Florida primary, Arnold Schwarzenegger endorsed him. So did Rudy Giuliani, who dropped out after the Florida primary. Most of these politicians have figured out how to thrive as Republicans at a time when the President’s approval ratings are in the low thirties. McCain’s advisers sometimes point to Schwarzenegger as a model, and it was, after all, the McCain strategist Steve Schmidt who helped guide Schwarzenegger to the political center—and sustained popularity.

As McCain approached Super Tuesday, he sometimes ticked off a list of Republican elders who are backing him: former New Hampshire Senator Warren Rudman, former Tennessee Senator Howard Baker, former Missouri Senator Jack Danforth, Senator Pete Domenici, of New Mexico. Between the South Carolina and Florida primaries, when Rush Limbaugh devoted his radio show to attacking McCain, saying that he would “destroy the Republican Party,” Bob Dole, the former Senate Majority Leader, came to McCain’s defense, by writing Limbaugh a letter in which he described McCain as a mainstream conservative. This elder generation of McCainiacs governed during the era of conservative ascendancy, but they were not the champions of the movement’s rise.

Referring to the people with whom McCain has surrounded himself, Gingrich noted, “I think they consistently represent a more moderate wing. And I think this is the victory of the moderate wing for the moment. But I think that’s partially due to a collapse of the DeLay wing of the Party”—former Texas Representative Tom DeLay—“and secondarily a collapse of the Rove-Bush wing of the Party.”

On February 3rd, two days before Super Tuesday, McCain watched the Super Bowl in the lobby bar of a Boston Hyatt, together with reporters and Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham. (Graham to Lieberman at one point in the evening: “What kind of kosher food do you eat during football?”) The next morning, the campaign flew down to Hamilton, New Jersey, and went from there to Grand Central Terminal, where McCain was to pick up the endorsement of former New York Governor George Pataki, a onetime pillar of the moderate wing of the G.O.P. Rudy Giuliani, who boarded the bus in Hamilton, sat in the circle lounge, hunched over the table across from McCain. Giuliani usually travels with a Secret Service-like security detail, but he had shed this entourage and awkwardly crammed himself between a couple of reporters. Whatever else one says about Giuliani’s unhappy run for the Presidency—he spent at least forty-eight million dollars and won one delegate—he was fairly steadfast in his views on many issues important to conservatives, especially abortion. He seemed relieved that McCain, rather than Romney, appears destined to win the nomination, and made the argument that McCain was the only candidate who could broaden the Republican Party.

“When I endorsed John, I pointed out that, as far as I can see, he’s the only candidate we have that can put virtually fifty states in play,” Giuliani said, pouring out some carefully worded frustrations about how his party has shrivelled in the Northeast. “That doesn’t mean he can win fifty states. Nobody ever wins fifty states. It means he can compete in fifty states. When he’s nominated, there’ll be an active campaign in New York, there’ll be an active campaign in New Jersey, Connecticut, Michigan, Minnesota, California, Washington, Oregon. If somebody else is nominated, they’ll go back to the thirty-five-state strategy. This is very frustrating for Republicans in this part of the world. They haven’t had a Presidential campaign since probably ’84, maybe ’88 in some places. It’s also helped to deteriorate the Party.” Left unsaid were the actual issues that McCain would have to run on to win in places like New York and California, where Schwarzenegger has been successful by adopting a liberal environmental agenda and shunning the national G.O.P.

McCain chimed in. “California, basically, has been written off by the Republican Party,” he said. “We go there for their money, and then we don’t come back at election time. And nobody’s been more eloquent about that than Governor Schwarzenegger. He said, ‘We’re sick and tired of it,’ several times. One of the reasons the Governor endorsed me is he knows I’ll compete in California.”

Two days later, McCain travelled to Washington to speak to conservatives at the annual convention of the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he blandly reassured them that he was one of them—that the conservative base had nothing to fear from his ascendancy. (To judge from the boos McCain received when he spoke, some of that dread remains.) On the ride to New York with Giuliani, as McCain talked about his plan for the general-election campaign, he seemed to be saying something different. In effect, he was arguing, along with Gingrich and others, that the era of Karl Rove was over. “The old strategy of just going to certain states and solidifying the base—I don’t think that works anymore,” he said, adding, “Not only that, but I think it would be boring.” ♦

Ryan Lizza is the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, and also an on-air contributor for CNN.